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An Ohio State University pharmacy professor’s falsification of published data is local evidence
of an emerging, unsettling revelation in the larger scientific community: Fraud, not inadvertent
error, is to blame for most bad research.

Misconduct accounted for more than three-fourths of the retractions of biomedical and
life-science research articles for which a cause could be determined, according to a study
published in October in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study’s examination of more than
2,000 retractions published in the past 40 years challenged long-held beliefs that error was the
primary culprit.

The study attributed 43.4 percent of all retractions to fraud or suspected fraud, 14.2 percent
to duplicate publication and 9.8 percent to plagiarism. In contrast, just 21.3 percent of
retractions were rooted in error. The cause of the remaining 11.3 percent couldn’t be
determined.

2011 was a record year for retractions with about 400, according to the blog Retraction Watch,
but it’s not clear whether the increase can be attributed to higher rates of cheating or to greater
vigilance.While nobody knows the rate of cheating, there are estimates that as high as 3 percent of
funded studies are tainted by misconduct, said David Wright, director of the U.S. Office of
Research Integrity.One of the study’s authors said he worried that their findings could undermine
public funding of research.

“If the public loses faith in us, this is going to be a much greater threat to science,” said
Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a professor and chairman of microbiology and immunology at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine in New York.One of the latest examples of misconduct involves the
research of Terry Elton, an OSU pharmacy professor. The federal Office of Research Integrity found
that Elton had falsified data in six journal articles.

Such misconduct has been shown to hurt funding for other scientists and could affect the bottom
line at Ohio State and other universities that rely on research dollars, said Dr. Ivan Oransky, a
co-founder of Retraction Watch and executive editor of Reuters Health.Ethics training and
preventing opportunity — requiring researchers to show their raw data, for example — are two ways
to deter such misconduct, Wright said.

And, he said, some universities are considering random data audits.Wright said his office relies
on universities to conduct primary investigations of research conduct.

If the university doesn’t handle a case properly, he said, it can be difficult for the federal
office to reach findings against a scientist.Universities, hospitals and other institutions have to
assure the Office of Research Integrity that they will oversee federal research dollars
responsibly, and the federal office opens about 10 compliance investigations per year for cases in
which it has questions about whether that’s happening, Wright said.

Though federal dollars are often at stake, the federal government rarely levies prison sentences
or probation in cases of research misconduct, Oransky said, citing only three examples in the past
20 years.

One possible reason, he said, is that scientists aren’t stealing grant dollars outright, though
they might profit personally from the prestige that comes with winning a large research grant.

Science journals should be more transparent about disclosing the reasons for retractions,
Oransky said. One journal in which Elton published a paper,
The Journal of Biological Chemistry, has had 37 retractions related to fraud or suspected
fraud, more than any other journal, according to the
National Academy of Sciences study.

But the
Biological Chemistry journal traditionally has refused to share with the public why it
retracts papers, Oransky said.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which publishes that journal and
two other scientific journals, recently created an ethics-manager position to deal with the
increase in “manuscript issues,” said Nancy Rodnan, the director of publications.“I think hiring a
staff member to handle these issues is showing our effort in wanting to deal with this at a high
level,” Rodnan said.Research journals’ willingness to be open is improving, Wright said.

“When they retract, they aren’t always as transparent as I’d like them to be, but they’re much
better than they used to be.”

While retractions are rare, they’re also underreported, said Dr. Ferric Fang, another co-author
of the research-misconduct article and a laboratory medicine and microbiology professor at the
University of Washington in Seattle.

Fang said it would be conservative to estimate that fraudulent research’s direct cost to the
public runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even then, it’s only a fraction of the
overall cost, he said, noting that bad research can lead to a waste of effort and money later on
and can create public misperceptions. One high-profile example was a 1998 study linking
vaccinations and autism that has since been retracted.

“You end up discrediting science as a whole when you commit an act of misconduct,” Fang
said.

Researchers are under considerable pressure to publish, particularly in prestigious journals,
Fang said. And many large universities rely on income from grant money to pay for at least part of
a researcher’s salary, particularly in the health sciences.

“We have to look in the mirror and think, ‘How can we make science better?’ ” Fang said. “It’s
much bigger than our individual careers.”